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Friday, October 25, 2013

Sydney and South Pacific

Instead of just visiting the Sydney
Opera House, we thought we should also take in a show.

We vaguely recalled South Pacific
the movie and decided to give the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical a go. It was
staged at the Joan Sutherland Theatre with a cast of 40 and 33 musicians and we
got centre seating to boot.

When the orchestra struck up the
South Pacific overture before the curtain was raised, quite a number of the
audience in the front row got up to swarm around the pit to investigate the
source of the music.. Being a little rough around the edges myself, I was
tempted to join but was prevented from embarrassing my wife because centre
seating meant having to negotiate more than 20 seats with “short-haul,
no-frills airline” legroom to reach the aisle on either side.

An excellent musical, the highlight
of our holiday down under!

Still, I have a little rough around
the edges comment to make.

When the male lead, Teddy Tahu
Rhodes opened up with his booming baritone I thought it was a mismatch to the
sweet female lead, Lisa McCune (who like Sarah McKenzie, is a graduate of the
Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts). But there was great chemistry
between these two on stage. In fact, the pair is being considered for the lead
roles in another Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, The King and I, which will be
staged late next year. Things seem to be
runningsmoothly offstage too for the married pair.

During intermission, I ended in a
long queue to the gents. Jørn
Utzon must have not factored in baby boomers when he submitted the winning
design for a national opera house in Sydney in 1957. The crowd that night were mainly
ageing baby boomers, I am sure it is the same for most performances, many with larger normal prostate glands that accounted for
the slow turn around at the 'little room'

Among the many excellent
performers, I was particularly attracted to Christine Anu who played the role
of the enterprising Tonkinese called
Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary had to tackle racism, sexual discrimination and
bondage in her quest for a better life. Her body language, accent and areca nut
stained teeth bear an uncanny resemblance to a Mak Ee Poh (eldest maternal
grand aunt in Peranakan-speak) in the
extended family of the people who once lived next door to my grandmother in
remote Teluk Anson. The last I remember of this Mak Ee Poh was of her trying to
match make one of the many nieces to a widowed senior clerk of a tin mine in
Ipoh to give her a better life away from this backwater.

From her dark complexion, I had
assumed Christine is South Indian. Well, Anu or Anusuya in full, was my Locum
pharmacist and she is Indian Malaysian. Thus I am pleasantly surprised to know
that Christine is of Torres Strait Island descent.

Christine Anu studied at the
National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association (NAISDA) and
graduated with an associate diploma of dance in 1992. Since graduating from
NAISDA, Christine has performed both in Australia and overseas with Bangarra
Dance Theatre and the Aboriginal and Island Dance Theatre. Christine is a
multi-award winning recording artist, including ARIA Song of the Year for My
Island Home.

Well done Christine!

###

The
Tonkinese are people from north Vietnam who were brought to the island to work
with cows and coconuts as indentured servants to the French planters. Their
lives were extremely hard, and their five-year contracts were unilaterally
extended indefinitely by the French after the start of the Second World War.

Peranakan
Chinese and Baba-Nyonya are terms used for the descendants of late 15th and
16th-century Chinese immigrants to the Indonesian archipelago and British
Malaya (now Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore).

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